Ishmael’s Real Name Was Jonah
The Interpretive Key that Allows Us to See Melville’s Work as a Unified Whole By Will Hoyt Like any other card-carrying American I have long believed that Melville wrote only one great work. Moby-Dick is—unquestionably if improbably—the one American novel against...
‘The Real World Is the World of the Permanent Things’
Bradbury at 100 James E. Person Jr. Ray Bradbury (1920–2012) was born one hundred years ago today, August 22. Bradbury was the author of numerous novels and stories beloved by several generations of readers worldwide, notably The Martian Chronicles, The Illustrated...
What Makes a Life
The Index of Self-Destructive Acts: A Novel by Christopher Beha. Tin House Books, 2020. Hardcover, 528 pages, $28. Reviewed by Jessica Hooten Wilson This is a story that begins with the end of the world. As a young man named Sam Waxworth arrives from “the provinces”...
Stuck with Pound
Cathay: A Critical Edition by Ezra Pound, Edited by Timothy Billings. Fordham University Press, 2019. Hardcover, 364 pages, $35. The Bughouse: The Poetry, Politics, and Madness of Ezra Pound by Daniel Swift. Farrar Straus and Giroux, 2017, Hardcover, 320 pages, $27....
There are metaphorical hills on which I would be willing to die. The Oxford comma is one of them.
So easy to forget that the best way to educate yourself is to read great works of literature and philosophy, then talk about them. Bring back the salon!